The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “You know what, though?” Betsy said. “We were good girls the whole time, Cassie. We were perfect. We never talked about anything we weren’t supposed to. They’ve got nothing on us—whoever they are.”

  “Fuck ’em! Fuck being a good girl!” Cassie shouted.

  “Watch it. Acme probably put as many bugs in as they took out.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Cassie said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go down to the car and just go.”

  “No way. Our car’s bugged, too. I’m going to take the metro down to National and rent a car. You pack for both of us and we’ll get out of here.”

  Betsy grabbed her purse and a windbreaker and stomped down to the Rosslyn Metro Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking into the Avis office. “I want to rent the best car you’ve got. I don’t have a reservation.”

  Cape May was a priceless little Victorian resort town. Wildwood, just a few miles to the north, was its antithesis, its streets lined with motels done in spectacularly garish Jetsons-style architecture and crammed with rowdy, drunken, gold-chain–wearing, backward-baseball-cap–sporting, cologne-reeking, loud-car-stereo–playing, chest-hair–showing teenagers from South Philly. During their progress through the city Betsy and Cassie were followed by carloads of such persons on several occasions, who shouted lewd propositions at them and held up signs saying Show Us Your Tits. At any other time in her life Betsy would have been scared. But she was with Cassie, and Cassie had a gun. So they laughed it off.

  “What kind of a place did you bring me to?”

  “Isn’t it great?” Cassie said.

  Cassie’s friends’ house was a flat-topped cinder-block structure with circular windows that were probably meant to look like portholes. Cassie had a key to the place. They dragged their stuff in, made a run to the local convenience store for high-priced, high-calorie, low-nutrition, low-fiber foodstuffs, and then to a liquor store for more Stolichnaya. They watched a Rambo movie on HBO, then picked out beds and fell asleep.

  At six o’clock Betsy’s internal alarm clock went off, and she went outside to see a wonderful dawn over the ocean. The house was about two blocks from the beach. All of the loud people from South Philly seemed to have gone inside for the time being.

  She left a note to Cassie and walked past restaurants and knickknack shops to the beach. She walked along the tide line, interrupted only by the cries of the seagulls and one lone jogger who was too fixated on the tunes coming out of his Walkman to notice her. Betsy was comforted by the shore, and she had a moment of peace. She breathed deeply out of the very bottom of her lungs. She thought of nothing at all. Cassie had been right. She needed this.

  She wanted to swim, but the air was still a bit chilly. She walked back to the house. Wildwood was slowly coming to life. Cassie was still zonked, curled up on her left side, her hair becoming entwined with her eyelashes. She, too, was breathing deeply and peacefully. She, too, was healing.

  They made a morning beach visit, Betsy in her big straw cowboy hat and Cassie in her Atlanta Falcons cap. They went back to the house to fix some lunch, and Cassie’s friends finally drove up in a BMW, beeping its horn excitedly.

  Cassie leaned out the kitchen window and heckled them for being late. “You people don’t know how to have fun. Betsy and me, we can have fun. We’ve been here a whole damn day!”

  Betsy felt shyness coming over her—a familiar feeling. She had felt completely content with just Cassie there and wouldn’t have minded if these people had canceled.

  There were four of them. As Cassie had promised, they were all in the national-security game, too. Cassie had already provided Betsy with capsule descriptions, so she knew who was who: Jeff Lippincott, an Agency man detailed to the USIA Visas Division, whose uncle owned the house. His girlfriend, Christine O’Connell, an Annapolis graduate who worked as an analyst at DIA. And two guys: Marcus Berry from the Bureau, and Paul Moses—an NSA cryptography specialist.

  “How did you get to know these people?” Betsy had asked last night.

  “They all go to my church,” Cassie shot back. “Marcus is mine, by the way. Paul’s for you—he’s a hunk.”

  Betsy had been so embarrassed by this that she had practically melted into a puddle. Now, as the four came into the house, full of energy and good cheer, she blushed just to remember it.

  Just the same, she had to admit that Paul Moses was a hunk—though not in a conventional movie-star way. He was a huge guy, with hands that showed he had worked. Round-shouldered, shy, good-natured. Straw-blond hair and blue eyes.

  Cassie had already supplied her with an opening line and forced her to rehearse it.

  “You’re a farm boy, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m an old potato farmer from Idaho.”

  “And I’m a wheat farmer from the Palouse country.”

  “Probably a Cougar, too.”

  “Guilty. I went to WSU because it was twenty miles away from home. Did you ever see Kamiaken Butte?”

  Indeed Betsy had. She’d gone to a model UN in Pullman and had admired the views of the Moscow Mountains and Kamiaken and Steptoe Buttes from the windows of the student union building.

  “My folks farm right up the north slope of Kamiaken. Gotta tell you I miss the Inland Empire.”

  “So you’re at No Such Agency.”

  “Yeah, they keep me in a cage and hook my umbilicus up to a Cray and we crunch numbers all day.”

  “I have about as interesting a life.”

  “Not true. You’re kind of infamous. I got warned about you.” And then in a taunting, teasing voice, “You go outside your compartment, you go outside your compartment.”

  Betsy blushed rarely, but when she did, it was a beaut. Her pale skin turned the intensity of her hair. Nobody had teased her in years.

  “Better be careful. I’m a career killer.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Moses said, “I can see you’re bad to the bone.” Both of them laughed. “Seriously, I don’t give a shit. I’ve had my go at D.C. I’ve been on the inside of the inside long enough. It’s time to go back to Whitman County and grow that hard red wheat.”

  “You’re really leaving?”

  “After another year. I promised my dad I’d stick with it for four years. He wanted to make sure that when I came home, I’d come home because I wanted to. And I want to. This life is absolute bullshit. Want a beer?”

  Betsy wanted a beer. She could feel herself tumbling for this guy.

  “I brought some Grant’s Ale—from Yakima. If I have to hear about the superiority of Sam Adams one more time, I’m going to puke. You’re the first northwesterner I’ve met out here, so I’m going to monopolize you. Hey, guys,” he shouted to the other four, “leave us alone.”

  For the rest of the day they talked about Palouse-country sunsets, black Labradors, Chinook winds, honest people, their hatred of bureaucracy, and fishing for steelheads along the Snake River. They did a comparative study of their high-school classes, laughed at yuppies, exchanged horror stories, and not once did they spoil it by mentioning anything even slightly classified.

  They walked along the beach halfway to Cape May and back, smiling at three-year-olds playing in the surf, savoring the old, old couple who hobbled barefoot along the tide line, picking up shells, getting pissed off at kids playing their boom boxes too loud, watching the seagulls wheel and dive for garbage. Late in the afternoon the sun vanished behind storm clouds, and they turned around and headed back. It was nearly dark by the time they returned to Wildwood. Some drunken yahoos passed close to them, but Paul’s bulk and Betsy’s lack of fear convinced them to go elsewhere. They finally encountered Cassie walking along arm in arm with Marcus Berry.

  “Christine got called back to D.C., and Jeff went with her. Some kind of military-spook shit,” Cassie said. “Some weekend, huh?”

  It was starting to rain. They walked through the gaudy strip of businesses along the beachfront and found their way into an Italian
restaurant with a decent seafood menu. Continuing their unspoken policy of not talking about work, they had a normal, healthy, totally inconsequential conversation over dinner, rambling from movies to sports to the relative merits of Macintoshes versus PCs.

  Cassie insisted on picking up the tab. Fumbling in her belt pack for her wallet, she came up with a white envelope. She blinked at it in momentary surprise, then handed it to Betsy. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “Before he left, Jeff asked me to give you this.” Betsy turned the envelope over in her fingers; it was blank and unmarked. She folded it in half and stuck it in one of the innumerable pockets in her hiking shorts.

  “Let’s get home,” Marcus said. “We’ve got a bottle of Sovetskoe Champanskoe Vino on ice.”

  “I can’t drink that stuff,” Paul said. “The sugars fire up my asthma something terrible. But you guys go ahead, I’ll drink a beer.”

  Paul and Betsy talked asthma all the way back to the house until Cassie threatened to draw her service weapon and silence them if they mentioned it again. The rain began to come down in earnest and the wind kicked up; their clothes were not nearly warm enough now. They gathered in the house’s living room, poured three champagnes and one beer, and Marcus proposed a toast: “To being outside D.C.” They touched cups and Paul added, “To better days.”

  More toasts followed. For a while they made a token effort to talk in a foursome, but the attraction between Cassie and Marcus was as obvious as that between Paul and Betsy. Cassie announced that she was going to the bathroom to take a shower and walked out of the room, casually flicking off the lights as she departed. A few moments later Marcus followed her, and they didn’t come back. Betsy found that her head fit naturally and comfortably on Paul’s shoulder, and Paul found that his long arm went nicely around her big shoulders, and as the evening went on, they found any number of other ways to get closer.

  They made out on the couch for a long, long time, serenaded by an endless parade of thumping car stereos out on the streets of Wildwood, gradually making their way to first base, second, third . . . and finally they were naked together. Paul was not in any hurry, which was nice. Betsy let him know that she was ready. Paul excused himself sweetly, ran back into the bathroom, and fumbled through his shaving kit for some condoms. When he came back, he had lost his erection. Nothing they did would bring it back—even though he’d been stubbornly hard from the first moment Betsy had put her head on his shoulder. “Sorry,” he finally said, “just one of those things.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve waited thirty years, I can wait a little longer.”

  “Oh. Well . . . I’d be lying if I claimed I’d waited that long.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t insist that everyone be as pure and innocent as little old me,” Betsy said.

  “Well . . . considering the kind of people you’re hanging out with now, that’s probably a good policy,” Paul said.

  eighteen

  WHAT KIND of man would act as an accomplice in a plot to frame himself for a brutal first-degree murder, in a foreign land where everything was stacked against him?

  Clyde kept asking himself this question and, whenever he pulled jail duty, kept watching Sayed Ashrawi in hopes of getting an answer. Most of the inmates in the Forks County Jail were foul, violent, abusive, stupid drunks. They had to put Ashrawi in a separate cell to keep him safe from these people—the Arab was a slight man with a concave chest. Not the sort who could realistically haul the 160-pound Marwan Habibi into a rowboat, beat him to death with an oar, or accomplish any of the other prodigies of which he was now being accused.

  After Ashrawi was jailed, he went for three days without eating any food, because the jail’s food was not what he called halal. Then some of the other Arab students began to bring in some tidbits that he was willing to eat. His most frequent visitor was one Dr. Ibrahim Abboud, who already had a Ph.D. from a university in England and was working on a second. It was Abboud who had spoken in English for Kevin Vandeventer’s benefit as they had carried Marwan Habibi’s corpse out of Lab 304. Clyde had him pegged as the ringleader of this little conspiracy and took a particular interest in his jailhouse visits.

  But this was for naught because Dr. Ibrahim Abboud had Clyde pegged, too. It appeared that Abboud was the only person on the face of the earth, with the exception of Desiree, who did not automatically underestimate Clyde’s IQ by a good fifty points upon first seeing him. So Abboud was all knowing smiles and guardedness whenever Clyde was in the room. Clyde asked him once where he obtained halal food in a place like Forks County, Iowa. Abboud, for once, dropped his guard. “From a Jewish rabbi,” he said.

  When Ebenezer had finished stripping the roadkill buck down to bones and cartilage, and selected his own thirty or forty pounds of flesh as commission, he had turned all the remaining meat over to Desiree, except for one watermelon-sized bundle, which he had dumped into Clyde’s arms: “Odds and ends.”

  That bundle was now resting in a Styrofoam cooler in the back of Clyde’s pickup truck. Though he would never mention it to Ebenezer, he had also thrown in several other cuts of meat, painstakingly salvaged by the old man, that Clyde knew from experience to be shot through with sheets and cords of deer structural material that made for difficult chewing and worse digestion. Ebenezer was the only nonaborigine who ever bothered with these parts and had invented his own terms for them: “neck nugget,” “pelvic potpourri,” and so on.

  This was Saturday, Desiree’s day to sleep in. As soon as Maggie had begun to stir that morning, Clyde had rolled out of bed, extricated her from her crib, wrapped her in a blanket, and spirited her out of the bedroom like a ticking bomb. Now, one nap-and-bottle cycle later, she was strapped in her baby carrier, a streamlined plastic module with a handle so that you could carry the child around all day and never actually have to touch her. Clyde swung it into the pickup and docked it with its mother ship, a color-coordinated pedestal already strapped in place on the passenger seat. Industrial baby-handling technology continued to march forward at a pace matched in few other fields; friends of theirs with two-year-olds had car seats and baby carriers that might as well have been lashed together from sticks and rawhide, so primitive did they seem in comparison with the wonders that had begun to appear in their home after the first of several Dhont-sponsored baby showers. Clyde had little doubt that if he and Desiree ever had another baby, they would have to take all this stuff and beg homeless people and Ethiopians to take it off their hands for free, to make room for the new generation of technology.

  Clyde stirred his hand through a rusty tire chain on the bed of the pickup, found its end, and draped it carefully over the top of the Styrofoam cooler so that it would not blow away when he got the vehicle up to cruising speed. Then he opened the driver’s-side door, shifted it into neutral, rested one foot lightly on the parking-brake pedal, and released it silently. He leaned one shoulder against the frame of the open door and shoved the truck forward with a long, slow thrust of both legs. It began to coast down the gentle slope of the driveway. He climbed in and allowed it to roll out into the street before slamming the door and starting the engine, two activities that, in a truck of this vintage and in this condition, would be sure to wake Desiree if performed within the garage.

  Maggie began to fuss aimlessly as they passed down into the old redbrick city of Nishnabotna and the great stacks of the Matheson Works rose to port. She had done well so far, considering that Desiree was not there to subject her to the continual stream of cooing, nose kissing, toy jiggling, and peekabooing that normally filled Maggie’s senses every waking moment. Clyde’s demeanor was, to put it mildly, more reserved, to the point where Maggie could have been forgiven for supposing that her father had tripped and fallen in the driveway and the truck had been coasting driverless toward the river ever since.

  When Clyde had first seen the way Desiree played with the baby, he had been humbled that she possessed such talents so lacking in himself. He had been even more humbled when Desi
ree had mentioned to him—offhandedly, and not in a way intended to inspire guilt—that all of this was not playing but “stimulation,” that each silly game was not improvised but planned to foster one important part of the infant’s brain or another. Desiree’s playing all came with footnotes. Clyde could only suppose that if he were to raise Maggie by himself, the girl would grow up to be a lopsided mouth-breather who walked into closed doors.

  “Konrad Lukas and Sons” had been painted on the brick wall of their destination sometime around the turn of the century. Below, where it had probably said “Abbatoir” or “Slaughterhouse,” the words “Specialty Meats and Custom Slaughtering” had been painted in much more recently.

  The cooler would require both of his hands, so he took the radical measure of unsnapping his daughter from the baby carrier/car seat module and transferring her to the reversible backpack/frontpack baby carrier module. He slung her onto his back, tossed the tire chain off the cooler, and carried that box of odds and ends around to the front of the building.

  Outside the butcher’s was the largest collection of university-related vehicles Clyde had ever seen in Nishnabotna. Mixed in were a few cars that clearly didn’t belong: a new Cadillac and a Volvo station wagon whose license plates marked them as being from other counties in Iowa, an hour or two distant. The car closest to the entrance was a big Chevy Caprice sedan, a model typically used for cop cars; but this one was navy-blue and bore no special equipment or insignia except for a yellowed cardboard sign on the dashboard reading Clergy and bearing a Star of David. This car had Illinois plates.

  He came around the corner of the building onto the brick sidewalk, separated from the brick street by a stone curb at least two feet high. A dark-suited, bearded fellow wearing a black fedora was just emerging from the front door of Lukas Meats, carrying a large leather satchel. He threw the satchel into the trunk of the Caprice, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove away.